Turkey says 'rejects and condemns' Putin calling 1915 Armenian massacre 'genocide'
ISTANBUL
Russia's President Vladimir Putin (R)
attends a commemoration ceremony marking the centenary of the mass
killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in Yerevan, Armenia, April 24,
2015.
Reuters/Alexei Nikolsky/RIA Novosti/Kremlin
(Reuters) - Turkey
said on Friday that it rejected and condemned Russian President Vladimir
Putin calling the 1915 mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks a
genocide. "Considering the mass killings, exiles...that Russia
has carried out in the Caucasus, Central Asia and in eastern Europe over
the past century...we think it should be the one that knows best what a
genocide is and what its legal dimensions are," a foreign ministry
statement said
The Armenian Genocide Monument in Yerevan. To this day, the Turkish state denies that a systematic annihilation ever occurred.Credit Photograph by Patrick ALLARD/REA/Redux
On
April 24th, millions of people around the world will mourn the
implementation of a plan—devised by Ottoman officials a hundred years
ago, amid the chaos of the First World War—to annihilate the Armenian
people in their native homeland. Initiated in 1915, the policy was
brutally effective; by the war’s end, it had resulted in the destruction
of virtually every Armenian community outside Constantinople, and the
elimination of more than a million people from territory in what is now
modern Turkey. This is what is meant by the term “Armenian genocide.” In
any context, one would expect that such an event would cause lasting
collective trauma. For many Armenians living around the world, in a
state of post-Ottoman diaspora, that trauma has been compounded by the
lack of official recognition and reconciliation. To this day, the
Turkish state denies that a systematic annihilation ever occurred (by
the name of genocide, or any other). And Armenians continue to struggle
with the official negation: to endlessly combat it is its own form of
prison, but to try moving past it unilaterally, abandoning the horrific
events of 1915 in the shadows of denial, is to succumb to willful
blindness and injustice. Decades ago, The New Yorker published a
short story by William Saroyan, titled “The Duel,” which offered the
possibility of magical self-release from this dilemma: its protagonist, a
trash-talking teen-age Armenian-American, decides in a moment of
delirious oratory that he’ll simply turn his eyes from any Turks in the
world, and thus be free from the need to engage in the ceaseless
duelling. But, of course, one side on its own cannot heal the scars of
genocide. As Pope Francis noted in a recent sermon on 1915, “Concealing
or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without
bandaging it.”
Recently,
however, there has been cause for optimism. Haltingly, and with
difficulty, well beneath the upper strata of government in Ankara, a
reckoning with history is edging forward in Turkey. For the first time
in decades, it is possible to utter the words “Armenian genocide” there
without facing certain criminal prosecution. Liberal-minded Turks in
increasing numbers are challenging the old taboos, and many Kurds living
in Turkey now speak with plain remorse about their ancestors’
complicity in the massacres. At the municipal level, some cities have
even taken steps toward reconciliation. Reactionary forces certainly
push against these changes—the word “Armenian” remains a slur,
apparently even for Turkey’s President—but, in a way that feels new and
genuine, one can now map the direction of progress: within a decade or
two, denying the effort to exterminate Armenians may well become
untenable in Turkey.
My ancestors were Ottoman
Armenians: on my mother’s side from Istanbul and Malatya, and on my
father’s from the city of Diyarbakir. In a piece that ran in The New Yorker earlier this year, titled “A Century of Silence,”
I wrote about my family’s survival in Diyarbakir, and also about the
remarkable spirit of atonement that has taken hold in that city. The
people of Diyarbakir encouraged me to feel a sense of belonging there,
and I’ll respond by expressing a wish on the genocide’s centenary: that a
small street in Ankara be renamed. For decades, that street, near
Botanik Park, has honored the Ottoman governor of Diyarbakir in 1915,
Dr. Mehmet Reşid. This should be an affront to Turks and Armenians
alike.
A little about Reşid. He was Circassian,
born in Russia in 1873. When he was one year old, his family fled the
Tsarist persecution of Muslims and immigrated to the collapsing Ottoman
Empire. As a doctor in training, he became preoccupied with the empire’s
weakness. “The Ottoman element is shrinking,” he recalled telling
veterans of the Greco-Turkish War with tears in his eyes. “Ottoman land
is disappearing piece by piece. Of this we are witness, and we know who
the culprits are.” By the time he assumed Diyarbakir’s governorship, he
had come to view Armenians as harmful “microbes,” and treated them as
such: he once boasted that he had eliminated a hundred and twenty
thousand people from the region. The violence that Reşid wrought upon
Diyarbakir province was so indiscriminate, targeting Christians of
myriad sects among the Armenians, that the Interior Minister ordered him
to dial it back. (“It is categorically prohibited for disciplinary
measures imposed in regard to the Armenians to be implemented against
other Christians,” a secret telegram stated.) Reşid ignored the
directive, and, assiduously, he removed local officials who refused to
carry out the genocidal “discipline.” In May of 1915, the district
governor of Mardin told him, “I am not a man without conscience; I have
nothing against the Christians of Mardin; I will not execute these
orders.” He was expelled. Two other local officials who refused were
murdered. Evidence later gathered by Ottoman investigators indicated
Reşid’s culpability; after the war, when a Turkish journalist found
Reşid and asked him about the assassinations and the mass killings, he
threatened to walk out of the interview. “It’s all slander,” he
declared. “Aren’t newspapers the source of defamation and anarchy,
anyway?” It
is hard to overstate the symbolism of that street name, of its
endurance in a world capital even now, but perhaps a personal story can
help to illustrate it. I never met my father’s father, a tailor by trade
who passed away before I was born. Nor did I ever meet my mother’s
father. But an elderly man from Diyarbakir, Nishan Tususian, a
pharmacist in Queens who had helped my father immigrate to New York,
played the role of grandfather in my life. He would stay in our home for
days, taking my sister and me on walks, collecting leaves, spotting
birds. Often, he spent afternoons beside a sunlit window reading the
Encyclopædia Britannica. When he was not with us, he travelled, almost
compulsively. (In a worn suitcase, he always packed an old hammer, for
protection.) His presence in our home was a given, a simple thing; to
think of it as the result of survival, as the result of bravery
or cleverness in the face of mass murder, or as the consequence of
random events falling into life-saving alignment, was impossible then,
and maybe it still is for me. Mr. Nishan, as we called him in Armenian,
was a man of quiet gentleness, seemingly untouched by cruelty of any
kind. Last year, in a suitcase stuffed with old photos in my parents’
home, I found a picture of him from the nineteen-fifties, outside the
city of Tripoli, on the northern coast of Lebanon. (I can guess the
decade because my uncle, who is dressed in a dark suit, was accidentally
killed by a stray bullet, in Beirut, in 1958.) Nishan stands at the
center—a younger, more vital version of the man that I remember. At
the time I found this photo, my father shared with me a seven-page
typed memoir that Nishan had written, in imperfect but matter-of-fact
English, bound in baby-blue card stock. The document, forgotten at the
bottom of a drawer after his passing, was titled “Escape from the
Turks.” April 24th will mean many things to many people, but for me, I
expect, the act of commemoration will involve the memory of first
reading those seven pages, and the sudden awareness that this man who
treated me like a grandchild carried with him a secret piece of such
monstrous history.
The youngest of nine brothers
and sisters, Nishan grew up in a stone house with a courtyard in the
center of Diyarbakir city. He began his memoir by explaining that he
graduated from secondary school in 1912, intending to go to college the
following year. The Great War broke out in 1914; several months later
his father’s hardware store was burned, along with hundreds of others
Armenian businesses. In March of 1915, Reşid was appointed governor in
Diyarbakir, replacing a more tolerant predecessor, and a climate of
terror soon took hold among Armenians. Some of Nishan’s siblings had
emigrated, but three brothers and two sisters remained. His brother
Hagop was quickly detained and killed. His brother Vahan was conscripted
into the Ottoman Army, released after the payment of a fee, but then
arrested and imprisoned for carrying a pistol. His brother Dikran was
imprisoned because of his membership in a political party. Nishan’s
father, who was eight-four, died of old age that year. Two months later,
his mother succumbed to typhoid fever. By the time of her burial, even
the priest was unwilling to venture to the graveyard, so Nishan, who was
then living with a sister and her family, went out with the pallbearers
to learn of her resting place. “At the funeral procession, I was the
only one there,” he wrote.
Reşid had assembled a
strike force to enact “punishment.” Working with the local office of
the Committee of Union and Progress, the party then in control of the
Ottoman state, and with Kurdish irregulars, he created eleven
battalions, populated by “the worst specimens of thieves, brigands,
murders, deserters, etc.,” the former British pro-consul in Diyarbakir
wrote in a report filed to the U.S. State Department in 1919. The
eleventh battalion became known as the Butcher’s Battalion. At the end
of May, on Reşid’s orders, more than six hundred Armenians who were
detained in Diyarbakir prison—Nishan’s brother Vahan among them—were
sent down the Tigris River on rafts and killed. The massacre was a
turning point; the province thereafter became a wasteland of corpses. “I
witnessed numerous ghastly scenes, women and children lying here and
there in the valleys, either killed or dead from exhaustion,” a survivor
later recalled. Another remembered women being separated from their
children at a valley near Mardin: “When our mother came for the last
time and kissed us madly, I remember she was clad only in her white
underwear; there were no ornaments, no gold and no velvet clothes. We,
the children, were unaware of the events happening there. In reality,
they had taken off their clothes, one after the other, had arranged the
garments on one side, had stripped the women completely, had cut their
heads with axes and had thrown them into the valley.” Streams of people
were forced to march south across the provincial landscape, into Arabia.
As the Minister of Interior told the American ambassador, “We will not
have Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert, but
nowhere else.” In
June, a Turkish official arrived at Nishan’s home and instructed the
family to pack: they were being deported to the south. Nishan’s brother
Dikran was released, so he could join them. Nishan was pressed into a
convoy and expelled to Urfa, then to Aleppo, then through an archipelago
of isolated transit camps, toward a forlorn settlement, now in the
Syrian Desert, called Der Zor. It is estimated that two hundred thousand
people were slaughtered at Der Zor. The convoy, lead by Circassians and
Kurds, varied in number as it moved, but it began in Diyarbakir with
three hundred people: “all our neighbors, about forty boys, two men,
including my brother who was released from prison.” Because Nishan’s
brother could not walk, the family purchased a cart for five gold
pieces. “When we emerged from the city gate, we saw by the city wall
three-to-five-year-old boys, about a hundred of them helpless, out of
the passing caravans,” he recalled. Shortly afterward, Dikran was
removed from the cart and killed. The memoir devotes only a sentence to
his slaying: a displeased Circassian gendarme “with three or four Kurds
knifed him by the side of the road.” On
the way to Urfa, the convoy camped at a spot known as the Devil’s
Valley, where, Nishan wrote, “they picked seven men and shot them.”
(Several days later, scores of Armenians from Urfa, including the city’s
archbishop, were massacred in that valley.) Passing a village named
Karacadağ, he saw a gendarme with a rifle, joined by men with whips and
cudgels, emptying homes of people. One of the men beat a girl trying to
revive her mother, who had fainted. “There were a thousand bodies shot
and scattered a mile around,” Nishan wrote; as the convoy progressed, “a
donkey stumbled, and fell. Our neighbor Manoug helped the driver raise
the donkey. He was shot.” The convoy diminished as it moved, leaving in
its trail ailing women and children, who could not keep up, scattered
possessions, and the dead. Farther down the road, one of the Circassians
prepared to murder six boys, Nishan among them. In an interview that
Nishan later provided to an Armenian oral-history project, he recalled
that moment: standing away from the gendarme, stunned, imagining the
knife entering his body, while the other boys begged for mercy. Several
women in the convoy intervened: “They collected some money, and the
gendarme was pacified.” Taking the money and a twelve-year-old girl, the
Circassian mounted his horse and rode off.
From
Urfa, along with other deportees, Nishan was packed into a train for
Aleppo. He sought out relatives there, and for a month lived incognito,
until he was discovered and forced into another convoy headed for Der
Zor. Moving south along the Euphrates, the convoy grew to five hundred
deportees; after several days of marching, it reached a camp called
Abuharar, where, Nishan wrote, “there was starvation. People who could
not stand on their feet were taken and lined up on one side of the camp,
to wait their end.” Nishan met a friend of his brother who told him
that if they did not escape they would either be marched until they died
of exhaustion, or killed at their destination—“Der Zor means death.”
The
two planned to meet at a telegraph pole outside the camp. “I got away
first, waited by the pole for some time,” Nishan wrote. “My friend did
not show up.” Alone, using the stars as his guide, Nishan fled through
the desert, stopping on four occasions. “The first time, an Arab
shepherd robbed me. The next day a good Arab took me into his tent, fed
me, put me on the right road. The third time, two gendarmes caught me.
They could have shot me, but they let me go. The fourth time, when the
day dawned, I found myself in a flat country. There was no place to
hide.” Some friendly villagers took him in. “I slept there during the
day, and was on my way as soon as it was dark. In the morning, I came
across a caravan going to Aleppo. I asked permission to join them. I
reached Aleppo.” In
the last, dispassionate words of his personal account, he wrote, “It
took me three days to recover myself. The ordeal was over. This
completes my Odyssey.” Nishan devoted the final page of his brief memoir
to a family photo. Here it is, along with captions that he wrote for a
younger relative: thirteen typed lines, as succinct a story of 1915 as
can be told. This
post was updated with information from an interview that Nishan
Tususian gave to the Armenian Assembly Oral History Project in 1980.
The Armenian Revolutionary Federation Eastern United States
Central Committee issued the following message to President Barack Obama
on the eve of the annual White House statement on April 24:
“If
you cannot use the word ‘Genocide’ to appropriately mark the Centennial
of the Armenian Genocide, then, Mr. President, it is better that you do
not issue a statement at all.”
Tuesday’s meeting between President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff
Denis McDonough, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, and
representatives of the Armenian American community once again
demonstrated the Obama administration’s lack of commitment to human
rights and the truth, and the President’s inability to stand by his
word. The President’s Genocide statement on April 24 will once again
avoid using the word “Genocide.”
After six years of waiting for President Obama to keep his promise,
our community’s patience has reached its limits. “The facts are
undeniable. An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the
historical facts is an untenable policy,” he once said about the
Armenian Genocide. Those words should also apply to America’s chief
diplomat himself.
The President could have spoken the truth and stood with the rest of
the world, alongside the Pope, the European Parliament, and even
Turkey’s WWI allies of Germany and Austria. Instead, President Obama has
once again demonstrated an absence of courage and moral fiber, the
leader of the most powerful nation in the world crumbling under empty
threats from a genocidal Turkey.
Mr. President, the Armenian-American community, and indeed, people of
good conscience from all over the world, expect more. If you cannot use
the word “Genocide” to appropriately mark the Centennial of the
Armenian Genocide, then, Mr. President, it is better that you do not
issue a statement at all. The Armenian-American community neither needs
nor wants another April 24 statement that does not properly
characterize the Armenian Genocide.
Armenian Revolutionary Federation,
Eastern U.S. Central Committee
armenianlife.com – ANCA Chairman Ken Hachikian to Offer Testimony
– Watch the Webcast LIVE: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/hclive21 WASHINGTON, DC – The Commission on Security and Cooperation in
Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission, will hold an
unprecedented Congressional hearing on the costs and consequences of
Armenian Genocide denial.
The hearing, titled: “A Century of Denial: The Armenian Genocide and
the Ongoing Quest for Justice,” will be held on Thursday, April 23rd at
1:30 pm in room 2175 of the Rayburn House Office Building.
In announcing the hearing, the Commission’s Chairman Chris Smith
(R-NJ) issued an “appeal to the President to recognize the genocide of
the Armenians,” adding that, “on the centenary of this tragedy we should
join the German government and Pope Francis in speaking this word of
truth. I also appeal to the Turkish government to recognize the genocide
and issue a genuine apology. As mass atrocities unfold in Syria and
Iraq, the world needs Turkey to engage constructively with its
neighbors. The Turkish government can do this only after it honestly
faces its own past.”
Hachikian will, in his testimony, raise five direct costs of Armenian
Genocide denial: 1) the moral burden of mass murder denied, as recently
expressed so powerfully by Pope Francis, 2) the dangerous global
precedent of a genocide committed with impunity, 3) the threat that
Turkey’s denials represent to Armenia’s security, 4) the serious
obstacle that Ankara’s denials represent to those seeking the reform of
Turkish society, and 5) the impact of denial upon the ongoing
destruction of Christian religious heritage within the borders of
present-day Turkey. He will stress that: “If we are to end the cycle of
genocide – and no one is more committed to this cause than our
community – we must elevate America’s and all the world’s response to
genocide from a political calculation to a moral imperative.”
The Commission’s announcement reads as follows: “On the 100th
anniversary of the first genocide of the modern era, Armenians are still
fighting for recognition of the genocidal nature of the massacres that
began in 1915 and resulted in the death of as many as 1.5 million
people. The government of Turkey continues to deny the genocide and
actively punishes those who recognize it. The hearing will examine
denialism by the Government of Turkey and the decades-long effort to
seek accountability. The hearing will also provide an opportunity to
assess potential countercurrents in Turkish society that could move the
Government of Turkey toward recognition, and explore what the United
States and other countries can do to help bring about recognition and
eventually, reconciliation.” The following witnesses are scheduled to testify:
** Dr. Taner Akçam, Professor of History, Robert Aram,
Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair in Armenian
Genocide Studies, Clark University
** Mr. Kenneth V. Hachikian, Chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America
** Mr. Van Z. Krikorian, Co-Chairman, Board of Trustees of the Armenian Assembly of America
** Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Visiting Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
** Mrs. Karine Shnorhokian, Representative, The Genocide Education Project
The hearing will be webcast live. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/hclive21
EnlargeA still from "America America" (Credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment)
In
the era before the phenomenon of the human rights film—a genre that
seems to have begun in the 1980s with “Gandhi” (1982) and “The Killing
Fields” (1985), and would see a proliferation of such films by the first
decade of the 21st century including “Rabbit Proof Fence,” “The
Pianist, “ “Ararat,” “Hotel Rwanda,” “The Last King of Scotland”– few
films dealt with the complex regions of human rights histories in
foreign countries. I’m excluding, of course, the war film, a steady
genre since the 1920s, accelerating in the 1940s with films about
fighting the Nazis.
But
there was at least one exception—Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning “America
America,” which became one of the most daring human rights films in
cinema history. In it, Kazan brought the plight of the Armenians and
Greeks—the major Christian minorities in Turkey– at the turn of the
20th century into a sharp and dark focus, and he depicted the Turkish
massacres of the Armenians in an unprecedented way.
For a film
that was a runner-up for best picture of 1963 and best screen adaptation
and won an Oscar for art direction, it’s odd how little known the film
is. And, for a film that dramatically depicted the slaughter of
Armenians by the Ottoman Sultan on a big Hollywood screen, it has been
oddly overlooked or misunderstood by film critics, scholars and popular
audiences — even those with a deep interest in human rights and this
particular history.
Films fall off the radar all the time, for
many reasons. But at this centennial of the Armenian Genocide, it’s a
moment to take another look at the film Kazan called his own favorite,
and which the Kazan scholar and film critic Foster Hirsch has called an
“American masterpiece.”
“America America” is the story of a young
Greek man’s harsh journey out of Turkey in the late 1890s. The
protagonist, a young man named Stavros, has been awakened to the plight
of the Christian minorities in Turkey through the violent treatment of
the Armenians including his best friend and symbolic big brother—Vartan.
The
film opens with the dramatic massacre of the Armenians in Stavros’
village in central Turkey. The Sultan has ordered empire-wide killing
of Armenians in response to a group of activist Armenians who have taken
over the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in a desperate
effort to get the European Powers to intervene to stop the Sultan’s
massacres of the Armenian population in the previous year. As the local
Ottoman officials deliberate over the orders from the Sultan in their
bureaucratic chambers in a provincial Turkish town, Kazan’s
mise-en-scène has all the meticulous detail of his best interior social
and cultural settings.
From
there, Kazan creates scenes of a terrorized Christian village in
Turkey. We watch from an aerial perspective as the doors and shutters of
houses and stores are shut and slammed as Armenians and Greeks run
through the streets in terror. In the film’s black-and-white, shadows
and glaring light create a surreal-like feel.
We see the Armenian
population flocking to their church for protection. Kazan captures the
terror in the faces that are running, watching, hiding. In an
extraordinary scene that depicts this kind of mass killing, perhaps the
first such scene in a Hollywood film, Kazan’s depiction of Armenians
being burned alive in their formidable church in the center of town
brings together political realism with an expressionistic aesthetic that
recalls “On the Waterfront” or “East of Eden.” In a darkly lit scene at
the local raki club a man shouts, “It’s beginning!” and we understand
that the massacring of Armenians has a ritualistic aspect to it— and the
local population has been waiting for the sign to be given.
Kazan
then cuts to the inside of the church where Armenians are congregated,
as candles and incense cloud the interior, and a priest leads them in
prayer. The Armenians in the church are chanting (in Armenian no less) “Devormyah”
(“Lord have mercy”). Then there’s a cutaway to Turkish gendarmes
surrounding the church, carrying torches and brush; then a cutaway to
the interior of the church, where men, women and children are singing as
the church fills with smoke and the icons and crosses and altar are
enveloped. Outside, a priest is humiliated; he fights back, and a
gendarme puts a lit torch in his hand and throws the hand of the priest
into the burning church.
As flames engulf the church, we watch
smoke fill the narthex; the sound of Armenian words and the screams of
the dying dissolve into flames; we watch some people escape, and then
Stavros’ best friend Vartan is embroiled in a fight to defend his fellow
villagers. Then images of smoke and fire are juxtaposed in such a way
that the scene swirls and fades to a vortex of flame and black sky, and
the music crescendoes in an atonal flourish.
When Kazan cuts to
the smoke-covered remains of the church, the dead are scattered in the
streets; it is like watching the images of aftermath and ruin we have
become accustomed to seeing on our screens. Then we see Stavros sitting
next to Vartan’s corpse. Few scenes in the history of film at that time
gave us such insight into the dynamics of state-sponsored mass killing,
human rights atrocities and assaults on a targeted ethnic group.
After
witnessing the Armenian massacre, Stavros’ family decides to send him,
with all the family’s wealth, on a perilous journey across Turkey in
order to take passage to America. The film then becomes one of the great
bildungsromans in film history. Stavros’ journey is brutal; his
initiations into violence and corruption are many, and his journey
remains intertwined with various Armenians who continue to be sources of
agency for him on his voyage to the land of freedom.
I have no
idea if Kazan knew that the Turkish government succeeded in stopping
MGM’s production of Franz Werfel’s best-selling novel “The Forty Days of
Musa Dagh” in 1935 by coercing FDR’s State Department; “The Forty Days
of Musa Dagh” would have been a film that portrayed the Armenian
genocide with historical drama at a timely moment. Whatever Kazan’s
knowledge of Turkish interference with intellectual freedom in the
United States was, he did have a keen knowledge of the massacres from
his family. “One of the first memories I have,” he said in an interview,
“is of sleeping in my grandmother’s bed and my grandmother telling me
stories about the massacre of the Armenians, and how she and my
grandfather hid Armenians in the cellar of their home.”
Kazan’s
explorations of history and corruption, of human violence and
resilience, were insignias of some of his greatest films. “A Gentleman’s
Agreement” (1947) was a daring exposé of anti-Semitism in American
culture; “On the Waterfront” (1954) was a story of an individual’s
heroic resistance to mob corruption and labor union struggles among the
dockworkers; “A Face in the Crowd” (1957) was a dark portrait of a
megalomaniac con artist and his manipulation of mass media and
advertising culture, and the soulless terror of that culture. But
“America America” took Kazan’s passion for probing institutions of human
violence to a new place and a new historical reach.
A hundred
years after the Armenian Genocide, Kazan’s favorite film takes us into
the complexities of history as few films have. His aesthetically
inventive depiction of the struggle of the Greeks and Armenians of
Turkey at a crucial point in the history of the Middle East did
something new in the history of cinema. I wonder if viewers of the
Oscars in 1963 who were captivated, as I was, by Albert Finney in the
bawdy picaresque tale of “Tom Jones” (which won the Oscar for best
picture over “America, America”) understood what the film was about.
Peter Balakian is the author of "Black Dog of Fate"
(PEN/Albrand Prize for memoir) and "The Burning Tigris: The Armenian
Genocide and American’s Response," winner of the Raphael Lemkin Prize
and a New York Times Best Seller—both New York Times Notable Books; and 7
books of poems including the forthcoming "Ozone Journal" (University of
Chicago Press) and the forthcoming "Vise and Shadow: Essays on the
Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture" (University of Chicago
Press). He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the
Humanities at Colgate University.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is pledging solidarity with
Armenians but isn't calling what happened to them 100 years ago
"genocide."
Obama says the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks is a
solemn moment that calls for reflection on the importance of historical
remembrance and the work of reckoning with the past.
In a statement Thursday, Obama said he has consistently stated his
view on what happened in 1915 and that his view has not changed.
As a U.S. senator and candidate for president, Obama described the
killings of Armenians as "genocide" and said the U.S. government had a
responsibility to recognize them as such.
But Obama shied away from that description as president, mainly out of deference to Turkey.
Turkey is a key U.S. partner and NATO ally that fiercely opposes the "genocide" label.
Today, I am the proudest I have ever been of being
Armenian! I am completely filled with the most powerful diverse emotions. The
canonization of new Saints during the day, brought me to tears on many
occasions. Tears of pain, now replaced with tears of joy. And at nightfall, the
singing of Sadarabad by System of a Down, brought out my fighting spirit.
Our Martyrs had to endure a living hell, and now, as
Saints they inherit God's Paradise. Sadness and sorrow have always filled
April 24th, but The Holy Martyrs of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, bring a new
sense of life, renewal and peace on this day. 1.5 million souls departed and
scattered, now have become a battalion of God's Army. Many felt defeated and
downhearted, even in their unfathomable deaths, but today the 1.5 million Saints
are Soul's Victorious. The Angel of death greeted our forefathers, but today,
the Holy Spirit welcomed them, just as the dove descended on their icon.
Soorp Soorp /Holy Holy was sung with an Angelic voice,
which pierced all souls, dead and alive. The stirring and rousing of bells
ringing in all the churches throughout the world seemed like a grand entry into
His Kingdom. April 23rd, 2015 will be a day etched in every fiber of who I am,
because the Saints are in me as well.
As the sun set on this special day, a different stage
was set in Yerevan, as System of a Down gave a concert to thousands upon
thousands. Their proclamation of Recognition, Justice and Acknowledgement with
every fist pump and every hand raised, resonated in me. My pulse also screams
of the same - Recognition, Justice and Acknowledgement. Why not? We deserve it,
our great grandparents deserve it.Their words haunting… liar, killer, demon.
They bring me to the bloodied prison cell where Der Nerces Nercesian prayed til
his torturous death.
My son and daughter deserve the truth. Their
great-great grandfather, Der Nerces Nercesian, and great-great grandmother,
Yeretzgin Alpesa and two baby nieces, died a death worse then an animal's
passing. They too deserve the truth from a world that has remained mostly
silent. Perhaps a change is coming…but tonight.
Yes, but tonight, many voices are shouting from the top
of their lungs and from the caskets below, from the corners of earth and of the
heavens above. I too, am one of those voices, angry and screaming in silence,
saying and crying --- Turkey: admit, recognize and confess your evil
deeds!
So now, the two sides of my emotions rest in divergent
harmony -- in peace, at peace and still wanting for peace. Today, a New Armenia
was created within me, and I thank God for that.
Join Rafi Topalian as he discusses the past, present and future Armenian news, stories and related issues that effect not only the Armenian Community in the Capital District but non-Armenian readers alike.
